[group-organizers] Mass Add

[Chris Calloway]

On 4/12/2015 5:01 PM, Brian Ray wrote:
> If you get a chance, please send a quick note to introduce yourself if you
> haven't already.

Holy smokes. I'm an original member of this list and it never sees any 
traffic, so I consigned it to a deeply buried folder. By chance I looked 
today and it has had all this traffic this month I missed.

I help facilitate TriPython (formerly TriZPUG), a Python user group 
founded in 2002 in central North Carolina encompassing Raleigh, Durham, 
and Chapel Hill (and thereby the universities NCSU, Duke, and UNC) 
called the "Research Triangle" for the very large but old school 
technology park plopped in the middle of cow paths between those cities. 
The Triangle is not to be confused with the "Piedmont Triad" area of 
North Carolina to the west encompassing Winston-Salem, Greenboro, and 
High Point which have their own Python user group (PYPTUG). The Triangle 
and the Triad are about 100 miles apart.

TriPython has a monthly formal meeting and after-meeting social which 
rotates between the three cities of the Triangle. Additionally, instead 
of having a formal mentor program, TriPython has a weekly project night, 
one in each of the three cities. A project night is like office hours. 
People who need help can get help. People who just want to hang out with 
other Python programmers hang out and give help if needed. Somehow free 
pizza materializes at project nights.

These events are arranged so that you can go to a TriPython event every 
week of the month if you wish (and some do), go to an event on any of 
the week nights of Monday through Thursday at least once per month, and 
find a TriPython event in your city of the Triangle at least once per 
month if you are adverse to driving the 20 miles across the Triangle.

We have hosted a regional PyCarolinas Conference once that involved 
three other Python user groups in North and South Carolina. We have 
hosted numerous week-long training camps for both Python and Python web 
frameworks of various stripes. We have taken our Python curriculum, 
called PyCamp, on the road to other user groups for many years and I see 
some of those hosts of those PyCamps introducing themselves on this mass 
add. Despite our accumulated better judgment in how difficult organizing 
conferences can be on a user group, we are in the early planning stages 
of hosting a PyData Conference.

We have a local and independently organized PyLadies chapter with a lot 
of cross-over membership and cross-cooperation. I need to follow up and 
make sure they know about this list as well as our neighboring Piedmont, 
Charlotte, and Hub City Python user groups.

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway, Applications Analyst
UNC Renaissance Computing Institute
100 Europa Drive, Suite 540, Chapel Hill, NC 27517
(919) 599-3530